Suspect told FBI July 4 was original attack date

Friday

May 3, 2013 at 12:01 AMMay 3, 2013 at 11:04 AM

WASHINGTON - The surviving suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings told FBI interrogators that, as he and his brother plotted their deadly assault, they had considered suicide attacks and striking on the Fourth of July, according to a law-enforcement official.

WASHINGTON — The surviving suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings told FBI interrogators that, as he and his brother plotted their deadly assault, they had considered suicide attacks and striking on the Fourth of July, according to a law-enforcement official.

But the suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, told investigators that he and his brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, who was killed in a shootout with police, had ultimately decided to use pressure-cooker bombs and other homemade explosive devices, the official said.

The brothers finished building the bombs in Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s apartment in Cambridge, Mass., more quickly than they had anticipated, and so decided to accelerate their attack from July to the Boston Marathon on April 15, Patriots Day in Massachusetts, according to the account that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev provided to authorities. They picked the finish line of the marathon after driving around the Boston area looking for alternative sites, according to this account.

In addition, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev told authorities that he and his brother had viewed the Internet sermons of Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical American Islamic cleric who moved to Yemen and was killed in September 2011 by a U.S. drone strike. There is no indication that the brothers had communicated with Awlaki before his death.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev made his admission on April 21 to FBI agents who had been waiting outside his hospital room for him to regain consciousness. After he woke, they questioned him, invoking what is known as the public-safety exception to the Miranda Rule. A 1984 U.S. Supreme Court decision authorized, in certain circumstances, interrogation after an arrest without notifying a prisoner of the right to remain silent.

Also yesterday, the Associated Press reported that the body of Tamerlan Tsarnaev was picked up by a funeral home retained by his family.